You made a great film. Now give it a great run.
A smart move from the Festivus Film Festival; this series of YouTube videos presents volunteer screeners talking about the films they pulled from the stacks and got through to programming. It’s a great way highlight the films in your festival, present yourself as an organization that keeps its filmmakers’ interests in mind, and draw attention to your event in the process. There’s a bunch of these on the Festivus FF Youtube channel.
Fellow Austinite Lucas Martell has been hitting the fest circuit with his new short, Pigeon Impossible. (You may recall that I linked to an episode of Martell’s podcast a while back.) Here’s what he has to say about getting to know the festival staff.
One big thing that I learned at Palm Springs: do your research. More specifically, know the names and titles of the key people working at the festival. There’s usually 3-7 people ranging from print traffickers, to the festival director, programmers, and media coordinators. If you don’t get something from the festival introducing these people beforehand, they’ll definitely be in the printed program. Be sure to glance over those names so that when you run into them at a party, you’re able to put a face to the name and say thank you for all their hard work.
Read more on The Pigeon: Impossible Blog.
If you’ve read the book you know about my campaign against paper DVD labels. They are a cheap and easy way to make your burned DVD-Rs look vaguely professional, but they can severely alter video playback to the point of making a screener unwatchable. Google it up if you don’t believe me. The most compelling evidence comes from the Memorex Reference Guide for Optical Media:
Paper labels are not recommended for DVD discs. The expansion and contraction of moisture in the paper and the accumulation of heat in a DVD drive can alter the flatness of a disc enough that it falls out of the tilt specification and may not be able to be read.
This advice still hasn’t quite made it into the conventional wisdom – I still see plenty of paper labels on screeners – but when prompted, festival directors tell me that most of their bad screener copies are adorned with paper labels. There are, however, some alternatives that will get the job done and preserve the integrity of video playback. They are:
The laser inside a CD/DVD disc drive with LightScribe technology focuses light energy onto a thin dye coating on the label side of the disc. Only LightScribe media has this special coating. The light from the laser causes a chemical change in the dye coating that shows up on the disc. With laser precision, the drive renders the text and images that you created for the label.
Although the cost of LightScribe discs has come down quite a bit in recent years, they are still somewhat more expensive than regular DVD-Rs, even the ones with white printable surfaces (see below). Perhaps the biggest drawback to Lightscribe is the amount of time it takes to burn an image on the coated surface; I’ve seen estimates of a few minutes for a simple text label to up to half an hour for a complex image.
A cheaper alternative is a thermal transfer printer like the ones made by Casio; they won’t get you four-color printing but they will print on plain silver discs which are inexpensive and get you good-looking results.
One way to take advantage of the enthusiasm of an audience present at a screening is to gather their email addresses right on the spot. Bring a clipboard (or several) loaded with signup sheets that you print beforehand. Gather whatever information you think is relevant, but an email address is probably the contact info that audience members will be most likely to hand over. At screenings of The Yes Men Fix the World at South by Southwest, the filmmakers did just that and left the festival with dozens if not hundreds of points of contact to poll later about their political activities, later screenings, and eventual DVD release.
Of course not every film inspires the same level of “give me more” interest as that of a pair of humorous activists with an axe to grind. In every well-attended screening, however, there will be a group of folks who want to know when the film comes out on DVD or how to recommend the film to a friend. Capitalize on that immediate interest by letting those people take action in the moment.
Be careful about adding such addresses to your mailing list service in bulk. Your provider may ask you to use the “invite” feature instead of simply adding the addresses to ensure that the recipients really do want the mail you intend to send. Stay within the bounds of their service guidelines, however, and the clipboard-to-email method is a great way of adding new members to your list.
I would say that only three of the ten “insights” are ideas that haven’t been flogged to death in the indie film press over the last couple of years, but there are a couple of interesting quotes in there if you can wade through the redundant muck.
Every town has a film festival, there are film festivals of every possible genre, every possible niche that you can think of. And so now we’re kind of entering this world where nontraditional distribution platforms are starting to emerge and film festivals are definitely coping with and struggling with that new world. There’s real fear, I think, of obliteration. People think that technology will obliterate anything that came before it and I don’t believe that at all. I do think that film fess have to recalibrate, reboot, what their role is and why they’re important beyond simply promoting a sponsor’s product or beyond being a good junket for a few celebrities prior to the theatrical release of a big film. – Christian Gaines, Withoutabox
Read The World As We Know It Is Over? 10 Insights on the Movie Biz – indieWIRE.
Getting your film “out there” – whether that means out to the festival circuit or to a distributor or directly to your audience – is a sales job. A crucial part of any sales job is to figure out exactly what it is you’re selling and thereby determining who might want to buy it. In this exercise you will define your film and yourself in a number of different ways. While this may seem obvious and redundant, forcing yourself to formally document these things about your film can be extremely helpful in later stages of your film’s life.
Defining your film
Lucas Martell’s podcast is a companion to the launch of his short animated film, Pigeon Impossible. Each episode is entertaining in its own way (check out episode 2, “Writing is Rewriting”) and most of them focus on the animation process, but episode 12 speaks directly to the festival circuit. In particular listen to Martell’s advice about output formats and why the extra expense of converting your short to 35mm film might give you a leg up on the competition. Now that’s what I call a film festival secret.
From the blog of Felicia Day. Apart from being adorable and talented, Felicia is pretty smart. She’s been around the block a few times with the whole “original web series” thing which, at the end of the day, is the same as independent filmmaking. All four of these questions apply just as much to your indie doc feature as they do to her web series about online role-playing gamers.
The internet isn’t TV: It’s 20 million channels rather than 200. If you can’t sit down and easily identify what kind of person will like your show and name 5 places that person might go to on the internet, you will have a hard time getting the word out, no matter how good it is.
Read Web Series: 4 Things to Ask Yourself Before Starting on Felicia Day’s blog.
Film Festival Secrets: A Handbook for Independent Filmmakers
Written especially for people trying to navigate the film festival circuit. Start reading now or buy a copy of your very own.
